Top Five Reasons why Hugh Rodham (Hillary’s brother) getting $200,000 (now returned) to lobby in favor of pardons
and commutations for convicted drug trafficker Carlos Vignali and herbal supplement king Almon Glenn Braswell ain’t as bad as it looks:
5. Hugh Rodham won’t need those secret payments from
Marc Rich anymore.
4. Gives Jack Quinn someone to look down on.
3. Even drug traffickers need a break sometimes.
2. Makes clear Bill ain’t the only one with a loser
brother.
1. Gets that whole Marc Rich thing outta the
headlines.
Hey! Wait a second! Do I have to connect all the dots here?
Remember the laptop that went missing from the State Department
last year? Maybe Hanssen snagged it!!!
According to this article
just posted on MSNBC: “From February 1995 until January,
Hanssen was the FBI’s senior representative to the State
Department’s Office of Foreign Missions, where he oversaw an
interagency counterintelligence group.”
So maybe the problem wasn’t Madeleine Albright running a
loosey-goosey, slipshod operation. Maybe it was Louis Freeh
sending a spy over to help “oversee” State Department
intelligence.
Louis, good goin’ dude!!!
P.S. Could Hanssen have been connected to that Russian diplomat who got caught
working on an eavesdropping device outside State Department
headquarters back in ’99? Sure, why not? Put that on the
list too.
P.P.S. Do you have any reason to believe, or does it even
make sense, that Hanssen could have been involved in either
one of these incidents? No idea. But, hey, we’re talkin’
about Louis Freeh here so we can use his rulebook, no? Let’s
wait and see what Walter Pincus and Vernon Loeb come up with.
Robert Philip Hanssen seems so obviously guilty that the only mystery
remaining now in this espionage case is who Louis Freeh will
find to pin the blame on, and how he’ll do it.
Washington is filled with people who have mastered the
art of “failing up.” But no one has mastered this art quite
as well as Louis Freeh.
As the master profilographer David Plotz explained last fall, what’s most fascinating about
Freeh is not that his agency has managed to blow so many of
the high profile cases it’s been involved in over recent
years (Waco, Richard Jewel, Wen Ho Lee, etc.). The real
intrigue is that he’s managed to pass almost all of it off
as someone else’s fault. Who takes the fall for this screw
up? Janet Reno? Bill Clinton? Denise Rich? Bernie Sanders?
Who? Think fast! Who?
Journalistically Dishonest
Last Friday, John Fund of
The Wall Street Journal editorial page went on the
Ger
aldo Rivera show to chat about the brouhaha surrounding
the Marc Rich pardon.
At one point, in exasperation, Rivera asked Fund, “Have
you apologized yet for the (false) stories about White House
vandalism? Have you apologized?”
Here’s the interchange that followed. . .
FUND: I never ran — I never ran any stories about
it.
RIVERA: Have you apologized — has your newspaper
apologized for the stories about. . .
FUND: We never — we never referenced it.
Now, my understanding of this back-and-forth is that Fund
first denied that he had ever written about the prank story.
And when he says “we”, he’s talking about The Wall
Street Journal editorial page and its public online
incarnation Opinionjournal.com. So
in the second run-through he’s denying that the editorial
page had ever played up Prankgate.
So is this true? They’d didn’t even mention it? Please!
Not even close. How about the predictable Peggy Noonan on
January 26th “Back to Normal”or Tunku Varadarajan on January
29th “No Joke”? Or do only unsigned pieces
count? Well then how about this piece, also from January
26th “Gary
Aldrich Was Right”?
An editorial zinger to drive the point home?
Nope. I think this one speaks for itself.
Okay, let’s run down the official Top Ten list of reasons
why the Senate should reject Bush’s nomination of Ted Olson to be Solicitor General.
So Anton, a drum roll please. . .
The Top Ten reasons the Senate should neg Solicitor
General nominee Ted Olson are. . .
10. Made his legal career attacking and dismantling
federal environmental and anti-discrimination laws.
9. Successfully argued one of the greatest miscarriages of
justice in American history.
8. Just squints too damn much.
7. Too big a bud to Kenneth Starr.
6. What would the big polluters and tobacco
companies do without him?
5. Helped prep the Paula Jones legal team for their
appearance before the Supreme Court.
4. One degree of separation from former federal
prosecutor/Clinton-hating freak/Dan Burton
crony/Hillary-bashing author Barbara Olson is just too close!
3. Spent mid-1990s organizing and overseeing
multi-million dollar anti-Clinton dirty tricks campaign
called the Arkansas Project.
2. Because it’s the right thing to do.
1. ‘Cuz it would just feel so damn good.
This Washington Memo adapted from Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points
